Mobile Metrics: 7 Things Marketers Need to Know

Email address:

Connect with Author

Indrajeet is a Marketing professional with 6+ years of experience in managing different facets of Digital Marketing. After working with SpiderG - a Pune based SaaS startup, he is now ready to work as a freelance marketer with different SaaS startups helping them with marketing strategy, plan and execution. His love for old-school hard rock and metal music culminated in taking up guitar and starting www.guitargabble.com.

He’s studying Stoic philosophy, experimenting with productive habits and documenting the progress. Get in touch if you’re keen to know how you can implement pro-wrestling tactics in your marketing, community building and storytelling.

To strengthen your place in the market, and increase adoption, your analytics game needs to be strong. There is an adage that says, “What gets measured, gets managed.” This article will take you through 7 things about mobile metrics every marketer need to know.

1. Know Your Goal

When you don’t know what is that you are trying to achieve, you will be tempted to measure every conceivable metric. Therefore, before you choose the metrics, understand your business goals that your mobile app is trying to accomplish.

Below are some of the common goals you might want to set:

Generating brand awareness

Improving in-app engagement

Driving sign-ups

Increasing your revenue

Ensure that the goals you set will depend on the stage of growth your company is in. For example, a company that is in rapid growth stage will need to prioritize app downloads i.e. awareness over revenue, whereas a mature company will focus on recurring revenue generation.

The key is to have one primary goal and two or more secondary goals that support the primary goal. Knowing your goals will avoid the meandering, and will help you tie every metric you track back to your objectives.

2. Choose Metrics That Are Relevant to Your Goal

You need the right metrics to determine how close you are to achieving your goals. Sounds simple, yet many marketers try to achieve their goals by choosing the wrong metrics.

Take app downloads for example. You recently ran a campaign that generated crazy downloads, but what if within a week 80% of them had uninstalled the application? It just doesn’t add up.

So, based on your goals, choose a primary metric and select the remaining metrics that can complement this key metric. Doing this will ensure that you are not squandering your time by optimizing the metrics that will yield no results.

This list is no way meant to be comprehensive. Feel free to add new metrics that you feel are crucial to your goals.

3. Know Which Metrics Matter to the Stakeholders

So far we have discussed the metrics that are pertinent to our goals. There are a few more metrics (which can be included to the existing metrics) that you need to report to the stakeholders and key decision makers of the business.

Stakeholders invest in your business because of the potential profit they see in your product and business model, and ultimately, they care about money. Financial metrics will inform the stakeholders on the current and future financial state of the company. For a SaaS subscription based company, its stakeholders will care about Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) etc. The bottomline is, make sure that you are reporting the monetary metrics to the stakeholders of your company.

4. Understand How Each Metric Affects Your Business

The metrics you choose depend on your business model and in turn will affect your business, because you will be working towards optimizing those metrics and the related activities based on them.

A company in the expansion stage will aim to gain more customers. In such instances, CAC is a key metric. Now, to optimize CAC, you should not only try to reduce sales and marketing costs, but also obtain and engage new users quickly, focus on converting free users into paying customers, figure out the churn and reduce the causes of it and so on. Knowing this will allow you to allocate your efforts in respective areas and make the switch as the growth stage changes.

5. Actionable Metrics Versus Vanity Metrics

Vanity metrics look impressive on paper, but have no inherent use. If a data point can’t help you make any decision or is not in line with your goals, you should simply ignore it. For example, a high download count might look very impressive, but it has no actual significance to it. On the other hand, if you look at new user sign-ups then you’re going somewhere with it.

Note that data and information are different. Actionable metrics won’t help you make decisions on their face value either. Providing context to the data will help you make decisions. For instance, your annual churn rate has gone up to 9% from 7%. What measures are you going to take to reduce the churn next year? Knowing which actionable metrics to consider in this situation will help you analyze the current state. It is crucial to make necessary changes in the product or strategy that will help you solve such problems.

6. Measure User Engagement Metrics

Let’s look at the engagement metrics from a product development perspective. Engagement metrics tell you why users use your mobile app. They tell you which feature is being used the most, which screen is causing the user to abandon the app, how long are users using different features, is there any noticeable trend that can be capitalized to impact the revenue, and so on.

Metrics like app downloads, daily active users, session interval, session length and screenflow help you understand how users interact with your app. You can use this data to use this as a feedback loop for the product development team to identify new opportunities to enhance the product.

User retention is a challenge because it is difficult to predict user behavior that leads to churn. Metrics like churn rate, revenue churn rate, repeat purchase rate, customer lifetime value, Net Promoter Score along with some of the engagement metrics mentioned above help you uncover how many people return to your app, why some users stop using your app, the problems they face and how you can solve the problems to reduce the churn rate.

Wrap Up

The above recommendations will give you a perspective on how you approach the measurement of mobile metrics. Your goals should dictate the metrics you measure. While it will take time to set-up the tracking process, with the abundance of data available, it's helpful to know that you don’t need to track everything.